This seems to be an over-reaction to overly highlighted code. I work with Erlang in Emacs, and at first I couldn't believe how much of a Christmas tree my code looked like: every token had its own color, and it was really hard to read. Fortunately, erlang-mode has a setting to reduce the amount of highlighting. I don't think the proper reaction to a code base that has too many colors is to have none at all: trop c'est comme pas assez. I think many would be happy with some limited highlighting, for example comments, strings, and other constructions that can span multiple lines, incorrect escape codes, possibly-misspelled identifiers, etc. I don't really need or care that keywords and integer literals are colored differently.
